Up With God!
By Chaplain Norbert Karava
July 2, 2010

Of all the standards under which humanity has trod the path of its history, probably none has been more problematic and controversial than religion, which has survived every attempt of eradication by even the most violent and systematic of juggernauts.

The Marxist philosophers with whom I chatted into the wee hours of early morning on the clickity-clack trains of communist Poland saw the withering of religion into historical irrelevancy within 30 years as more certain than the setting of the sun.

The most perfect of all atheist regimes, Albania, under Enver Hoxha, in which not a single church, synagogue, mosque or temple was open and baptism was punishable by death, has passed and the faithful have returned to their sacred places with their prayers on their lips.

The church has survived even the likes of the indomitable Jesse “The Body” Ventura, who proclaimed that “religion is for the weak-minded.”

In the meantime, religion, whether we quibble over the epithet “fundamentalist” or not, has reasserted itself blatantly, to the embarrassment of its critics. Pray tell, oh secular oracles of man not-in-the-image of God!

What is it about man, since emerging from the mists of his own unclear past, inspires him to reach, not only beyond his mere self, but causes him to pine for the uncreated and divine?

The wonders of nature, the glorious risings and settings of the sun, the mountains, the seas, our relationships, friendships, romances, empires, victories, pyramids, trophies, trinkets, republics and all our various other baubles notwithstanding, there it is, the protest of the heart that brings about the most radical of all postures of the spirit, otherwise known as “religion.”